In an era when everyone with a phone is potentially a street photographer, the genre, famously associated with Arbus and Atget, Maier and Meyerowitz, seems almost too diffuse to grasp. On Google Street View, whole cities unfold for our delectation, the ‘decisive moment’ decreed by Mountain View, California. What price the precious instant against such consuming relentlessness?
A first full-length biography of Weegee and a handsome monograph of Garry Winogrand are radically different but pleasingly complementary contributions to an understanding of that quixotic figure of the photographic flaneur. Both are best known for prowling New York, Weegee by night, Winogrand by day, thirty years apart – working, as it were, opposite sides of the same streets.
Weegee was in headlong pursuit of event: murder, fire, confluence, confrontation. Winogrand was the master of the non-event that somehow gained significance through his recording of it. Weegee longed to step out from behind his camera, to achieve notoriety, to be a subject. Winogrand as he went on seemed almost to merge with his camera, photographing so ceaselessly that a substantial portion of his oeuvre has never even been processed. Both their careers were angled obliquely to the times.
As Christopher Bonanos notes in Flash, Weegee tackled news photography when its practitioners were almost entirely anonymous. He cites a huge 1935 Knopf anthology of new pictures called The Breathless Moment: ‘In its roughly two hundred pages, not one photographer is named, and the introduction doesn’t bother to apologize or explain.’ Yet New York was simultaneously becoming a bastion of the pictorial press. There were nine daily newspapers, notably the Daily News, a pioneering tabloid which at its peak sold nearly five million copies, and which advertised its commitment to the visual with a masthead incorporating a Grafflex Speed Graphic – the same camera Weegee would brandish as his permission to go anywhere.
Born Usher Fellig into a family of Galician Jews in 1899, Weegee landed at Ellis Island aged ten, and grew up in same Lower East Side streets he later photographed. Yet he sloughed that identity off almost entirely: his boastful and wisecracking autobiography Weegee by Weegee (1961), Bonanos notes, is materially unreliable, even about his number of siblings.
Fellig became the definition of a self-made man, composed, as it were, of the photographs he started taking in his teens, in and around work as a printer in newspapers darkrooms – in which, permanently impoverished, he sometimes slept when park benches were unavailable or doss houses unaffordable.
New York in the 1930s was raw, rackety, dense and dangerous. Bonanos has poured stupendous effort into pinning down the provenance of some of Weegee’s most famous images – the blood-stained corpses, the perp walks, the jagged juxtapositions, the slices of tenement life. On some, such as cornered, battered ‘Mad Dog’ Esposito and femme fatale Norma Parker, whole novels could be written. On others, Weegee even had a go himself, adding punchy titles. The rubbernecking crowds of ‘Their First Murder’ and ‘Balcony Seats at a Murder’ bely Weegee’s dismissive remark: ‘I have no time for messages…That’s for Western Union and the Salvation Army.’
What he loved adding most was a rubber stamp on the back demanding credit for at first ‘A. Fellig’, then ‘Arthur (Weegee) Fellig’, and finally ‘Weegee the Famous’. Bonanos describes how sedulously Weegee marketed himself and his working methods with images of his half-room over a gun dealer’s shop in Little Italy with a single chair, typewriter, newsprint wallpaper and bookshelf containing copies of Live Alone and Like It and The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult.
Weegee’s nickname was a photographic brand avant le lettre, allegedly derived from Ouija board – a reference to a supernatural talent for finding his way to crime scenes, which owed more to assiduous surveillance of police short wave traffic. In this way, Bonanos argues, Weegee became an archetype, popular culture reserving a place for ‘the squat guy in a rumpled suit and crumpled fedora, carrying a big press camera with a flashgun mounted on its side, a stinky cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth’, with the result that ‘people who have never heard of Weegee can describe him’.
It’s a provocative claim and, unfortunately, Bonanos doesn’t convincingly elaborate on it. Just when you’re ready to tour the depiction of photographers in cinema and/or an exposition of how Weegee’s use of single light sources influenced noir aesthetics, the author’s interest flags. We get Weegee’s role in providing the look and title of Mark Hellinger’s The Naked City (1948), but not the inspiration he supplied to more recent movies such as Two Evil Eyes (1990), The Public Eye (1992), and Nightcrawler (2014), which actually started as a biopic.
A by-product of Weegee’s relentless self-mythologising, too, is that the reliable biographical material is thin, which Bonanos can do little to disguise. For an approximate date of the dissolution of Weegee’s short marriage, for example, he has to rely on a pawnbroker’s ticket for $3 for what may or may not have been his wedding ring. More material concerns Weegee’s later life, when his work was far less even, and he became bizarrely obsessed with distorting lenses, enthusiasm for which he could not believe was not more widely shared. ‘You’re missing the boat,’ he complained to a sceptical editor. ‘These broads with five tits are gonna be a sensation.’ By the second half of the 1950s, observes Bonanos dryly, ‘Weegee had become an oldies act, and the distortion shots were the new album that nobody wanted to hear.’
By then, Winogrand was at work, turning his lens on a New York of calmer, more prosperous postwar streets, and in an arts environment more indulgent of photography: he benefited by three Guggenheim Fellowships. He too enjoyed a productive peak, in the 1960s, from which more than half the one hundred photographs in essayist Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Gary Winogrand are drawn. But Dyer has chosen with a free hand, inspired by personal affinities and creative responses, and the result is more than the sum of its parts, which were considerable anyway.
Where Weegee seductively normalised the shock value of his content, Winogrand was fascinated by the challenge of making a photograph ‘more interesting than what actually happened’, in a country of surface orderliness was now merely edged with unease. Dyer, whose The Ongoing Moment (2005) was an invigorating romp through a selection of classic photographs, relishes sifting for the allusions and self-quotations in images populated not by individuals ‘so much as highly individualised instances of character types’.
Four men gathered round an open bonnet evoke ‘the capacity of a car engine to swallow up all the philosophical depth of which men are capable’; a man and a woman in distracted conversation at an airport explore ‘talk as a way of killing time that is already dead’; a tiny figure sauntering past a blank bank wall ‘looks like a sequence from a thriller as it might have been directed by Antonioni’. As Dyer observes: ‘If you spend enough time on the streets you will come across everything.’ Technology’s instant totalities, then, will still not quite suffice to do them justice.